We found fraud, but it ain’t the voters.
TCAN has been diligently researching the issue of voter fraud. We’ve looked at the following allegations:
1) Voters are using false identification at the polls.
2) Non-citizens are somehow registering to vote.
Based on our findings, we are very surprised to hear what House Elections Committee Chairman Leo Berman has been stating in response to TCAN activists’ calls for the rejection of voter ID legislation. Many activists have gotten the following response from Mr. Berman:
I have a list of over 4,000 voters on the Harris, Bexar, Dallas and El Paso County voter registration rolls, who were dropped from the rolls because of NON-CITIZENSHIP! What do you mean there is no voting fraud?
TCAN found this puzzling, so we checked with elections administrators in several of those counties. It didn’t take long to find out what is really happening: a number of voters, when called to serve on a jury, claimed they were not citizens (there’s a form that asks that question). These were then dropped from the voter list as non-citizen registrations.
We found out this happened to about 200 voters/potential jurors in El Paso County and to 129 in Bexar County. Contrary to Mr. Berman’s assertions, this does not mean these people were not citizens or not entitled to vote. It just means they presented inconsistent citizenship information, probably in an attempt to avoid the very real financial hardship of serving on a jury.
If Bexar and El Paso counties, which have two of the largest populations of immigrants and non-citizen residents in the state, have had so few such cases, we’re still left wondering where Chairman Berman gets his “4000” number.
The answer comes from Houston. As we learned from Mr. Ed Johnson of the Voter Registration Office of Harris County, most of the dropped voters cited by Chairman Berman came from Harris County voter records. To get the maximum number of “fraudulent voters,” they counted dropped voters from every year since 1993. This reflects an average of about 300 per year. From a county with over 1.9 million registered voters, this number is infinitesimal.
It appears that someone is cooking the books to make “voting fraud” a political issue, leading Mr. Berman to report questionable information as fact. He may simply be the victim in this case; much like Enron stockholders were several years ago when they invested in that sham.
No matter the culprit, creating voter roadblocks based on politically charged misinformation is bad for democracy.
The fight will continue — on Wednesday the House Elections Committee passed this measure on a 4-3 vote. We’ll let you know how things go as this progresses to the full House, and we’ll be calling on you once again to help.
We’re going to defeat this thing.
John Courage
Posted: March 29th, 2007 under Voting issues.
